Huffington Post: France is Fighting its Own Taboos

We published an opinion piece about the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris in the Huffington Post today. In our view, the French have a long fight ahead of them, and most of the battle will be inside France. Here’s why… France is Fighting it’s own Taboos

France Is Fighting Its Own Taboos

By Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoît Nadeau

France’s war against terrorism will be long and hard. That’s because it’s not just a war against external enemies. The investigation on the Paris attacks is forcing France’s political class to face three blind spots: the integration of immigrants, religion and Europe.

At least five of the eight terrorists who attacked Paris on November 13 were French nationals. All of them were children of immigrants; all were Islamist Muslims, and most used another European country as a rear base.

This discovery has raised difficult questions about immigration, religion and Europe. They are all the more difficult for the French because they find it hard to talk about them in the first place. In French politics, the topics themselves are taboos.

The ambitious project of the European Union was originally a French idea, and France’s political class embraced it wholeheartedly — in fact, too enthusiastically. For almost 50 years now, France’s left- and right-wing circles have made it anathema to publicly criticize the European Union. The result has been disastrous: vilifying Europe became the bread and butter of France’s far right, which has a virtual monopoly on talking about Europe. Voters who have legitimate concerns about Europe have had no other party to turn to. Outside of the National Front party, most French politicians just avoid the topic.

It is impossible, with an enterprise as wide reaching and transformative as Europe, to avoid raising serious concerns about security, immigration and borders. The tragic events of November 13th brought the risks and weaknesses of the Schengen zone to the forefront. One of the first things President François Hollande did was reopen 285 customs stations on France’s borders. In France’s regional elections, slated for December 6 and 13, the National Front — the only party in France that has ever talked openly about border control — will almost certainly reap the benefits of this. The rest of France’s political class will only have itself to blame.

The other blind spots of France’s political class are ethnicity and religion. France has no official statistics on either. France’s National Institute of Statistics simply does not have the right to ask citizens for information about either subject. This stems from World War II, when France used its own statistics on ethnicity and religion to identity Jews. After the war, the French just forbade collecting such information.

The result is, everything written about ethnic or religious groups in France is based on pure speculation. Demographers can only ask indirect questions. Ethnic identity and religion can only be inferred. So the French have no idea who French Muslims are, nor where they come from, where they live, or what kind of jobs they have — or don’t.

This state of affairs grew out of what was initially a generous principle: the French Republic’s doctrine of assimilation. The French view the notion of assimilation positively. For them, it’s a noble goal. The unfortunate byproduct of it the assimilation policy is that when immigrants become citizens, statistically, they become invisible.

The lack of concrete information about ethnicity and religion in France poses no obstacle to police work, but it makes it almost impossible for the French to create policies to tackle discrimination on the basis or religion or ethnicity. It’s no surprise that the French have put in place many affirmative action measures to promote women. They have statistics to work from.

For the last four decades, the French have had great difficulty addressing problems related to the integration of immigrants, mostly because even raising the idea is viewed with suspicion. Anyone who uses the terms “immigration” and “problem” in the same sentence is immediately identified with France’s far-right National Front party.

The problems themselves are no secret. Welcoming 200,000 immigrants per year, as France has done since 2002, is a challenge for any country. But it’s all the much harder in France, where the job market has steep entry conditions. To get a decent job in France, one pretty much needs a French diploma and perfect mastery of the language. These conditions, practically unattainable for newcomers, have turned France’s immigrants into a semi-permanent underclass — one that was largely ignored until riots broke out in the suburbs of Paris in 2005.

Although some of the terrorist suspects in the 2015 massacres were well integrated, most came from the petty crime world of France’s underclass. But France still lacks the tools to study the conditions that produced them.

So France’s war against terrorism will be as long and hard on the home front as it will be abroad. All the more so since the terror attack of Friday links domestic and foreign policy in a way that has not been felt for 70 years.

Suddenly Home EIGHT: Beginning of the Day Rituals (or why it's so important to put off going to work a little every day...)

In my decades listening to friends talk about their jobs, I’ve noticed people like to get to work as quickly as possible.

Morning commutes aren’t joy rides, I get that. But what people who work outside the home might not realize – that is, until they join the home office tribe – is that it's not all bad. Going to work gives them time to get used to the idea of … going to work.

People who travel to work have a buffer zone before getting into performance mode: they get to wake up, eat breakfast, drink coffee, shower, get dressed, commune with their kids (or pets) and then walk, bike, drive or bus to their destination. It’s a great excuse to listen to the radio, or read or listen to podcasts or just think about other things.

For us home workers, little of this applies. When you skip the transport and personal preparation part, which is not essential most days, we have a pretty skimpy morning routine and no built in time for a bit of day dreaming.

I never thought that was fair. Call it a self-designed buffer zone, or creatively putting off the inevitable, as a self-employed person, I have always thought I deserved to ease into the day just like everyone else.

Since I have still have children at home, the first chunk of my morning is boilerplate: I wake the kids up, make sure they eat, give them an excuse to roll their eyes at someone who asks stupid questions.

But when my girls are on the sidewalk heading to school, I do not head straight to the office. I am usually in the living room reading my assortment of newspapers.

Everywhere I’ve lived and worked, I have created some kind of morning ritual that combines coffee, newsprint and sweat. Many mornings I do a Pilates workout while listening to the news. In different times and places, I have gone on a regular morning walk, or even a ski in nearby Parc Maisonneuve.

This means getting up earlier than required by the 40-hour week, but it’s worth it. Being able to switch out a commute for morning exercise is probably the greatest advantage of working at home.

Whatever you feel like doing, I’d recommend some kind of pre-work ritual to anyone who works at home. You might not be doing this forever, but it’s probably not going to be over soon. Being in automatic pilot for the first hour or so of the day helps you feel normal and ignore the eternal question of whether you really want to work at all. (In my case, it also lets the creative juices start flowing.)

Don’t get me wrong. I love my work and I usually wake up with ideas and projects. But that doesn’t mean I always feel like executing them. I wouldn’t go as far to claim a morning routine make you a better worker. It just helps you get to work without wondering if you really want to be there.

In my last post (Keeping the Kids at a Distance) I mentioned how my husband and I have learned to give our daughters the run the house during our work hours.

We just ignore the collateral damage until the end of the day. It’s the only way to keep our parenting duties (all but the essential ones) from dragging us away from work.

In an earlier post I also explained why you have to stake out physical territory to keep your concentration.

You need to protect your professional mindset as well.

In my experience, any activity related to cleaning or organizing household items is a direct threat to work. Sound paradoxical? Cleaning up craft supplies, filling the dishwasher and folding laundry seem like useful activities to squeeze into work hours, but they’re not. When you are trying to work, they are distractions.

If you don’t put housework off until you leave the office, it will suck the life out of your workday.

It might be the hardest thing to ignore, but everyone working at home has to resist the siren call of the kitchen sink. I might be hardcore, but I also avoid filling the dishwasher.

If you are new at the home office, you have seen just how fast the pile grows when you cook three meals at home. For those of working with kids at home, this has become to be infinitely harder. Because even when kids or teenagers occupy themselves during the day, they eat.

Still, even though the stack of dishes has reached a new scale, from Monday to Friday, we let it grow until we clock out of the office. Same goes for everything else lying around the house. When I see open paperback novels, pens, erasers, markers, USB keys and phone chargers littering my living space, I just move on until I get “home from work.”

One trick I have for avoiding the housework trap is to make sure whatever else I do during the day has a beginning and an end. Like a walk. Or a cup of coffee. We all know housework is a bottomless well. Starting chores in the middle of the day is like jumping down the rabbit hole with a rag and a bottle of bleach.

If I’m not making coffee, eating lunch or catering to another essential need, I try to leave the premises for a break. Yes, that was easier a month ago when it was still legal to step off our front porch. But even quick walk around the block is better than sliding down the slippery slope of housework.

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